While we intended to meet as a team at the first opportunity we had this morning to collaboratively discuss a potential visit to the White House, we accept that President Trump has made it clear that we are not invited.

We believe there is nothing more American than our citizens having the right to express themselves freely on matters important to them. We’re disappointed that we did not have an opportunity during this process to share our views or have open dialogue on issues impacting our communities that we felt would be important to raise.

In lieu of a visit to the White House, we have decided that we’ll constructively use our trip to the nation’s capital in February to celebrate equality, diversity, and inclusion – the values that we embrace as an organization.

Jerry Lewis' six sons were purposely excluded from the late comic's will. The legendary comedian, who died in August at 91, explicitly asked that they receive no benefits from his estate.

In documents obtained by the Blast and People, the Emmy-winning star's last will and testament declares the exclusion of his children with ex-wife Patti Palmer, whom he was married to from 1944 to 1980.

Lewis is said to have cut ties with his other children shortly after adopting Danielle as a newborn. Lewis admitted in several interviews that he had been unfaithful to Palmer, particularly at the height of his popularity with comedy partner Dean Martin.

The U.S. saw a noticeable drop in international tourism during the first few months of 2017, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

Visitors to the U.S. decreased by 697,791 over the first three months of the year, according to new data from the Department of Commerce.

The new data represents a 4.2 percent drop from the previous year, resulting in an estimated $2.7 billion in losses, according to the Times. Comparatively, international tourism saw a 6.4 percent increase during the beginning of 2013, following the reelection of President Barack Obama.

Tourism had previously been in decline during the global recession at the time of Obama's first term, the Times reported.
The decrease in international tourism coincided with a survey by the Pew Research Center that found only 49 percent of participants from 37 countries held a favorable view of the U.S., as compared to a favorable view of 64 percent when Obama left office.

Hurricane Harvey has hit Texas and is doing a great deal of damage to both life and property. Which is exactly when we need, positively desire, there to be price gouging, instead of the laws we have against it. The basic underlying economics being that we want whatever scarce resources there are to be applied to their most valuable uses. Further, we want to encourage the provision of more supply of them--both of these being the things which the price system manages for us. That is, allowing prices to rise in the aftermath of a disaster does exactly what we want to happen.

So, why all these laws against it? As Texas does indeed have laws against it:

My own version of dealing with price gougers would be to thank them for the good work they're doing--I doubt that's what Ken Paxton has in mind there.

"Price gouging by Texas merchants in the path of Hurricane Harvey has drawn the attention of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who said Saturday that his office is looking into such cases.

“We’ve already found one big retailer that was charging $42 for a case of water,” Paxton told Fox & Friends. “Another, a gas station $99 for a case of water.”

"We’ll be dealing with those people as we find them,” he said.

He wants to punish such people. The economics of this is really terribly, terribly, simple. As a result of the disaster--of any disaster that is--some things are in short supply. Perhaps because some of the supply got damaged, or perhaps because people need to substitute. Floods could, for example, knock out the municipal water supply, leaving people needing bottled water. So relative to the available supply demand has risen. We now need some method of rationing that limited and scarce supply over that increased demand. Rationing by price is always the efficient way of doing this.

We also want something else to happen--we want supply to increase as fast as we can manage that. As we know from our basic Econ 101 supply and demand curves the way to increase supply is for the price to increase. We want, for example, people to start trucking bottled water from Louisiana to Texas. More money to be made by doing so will encourage people to do so. And as that extra supply arrives then prices will go down again as demand is met.

We want people to use less of the scarce resource, we want people to supply more of the scarce resource, allowing the price to rise is the one known way of achieving both those goals. So, why is it that we have these laws against it all? The answer is that we're human, we are interested in both efficiency and equity and the people more interested in that equity are the ones who have written these laws. The balance, to my mind at least, going much too far toward that equity and against that efficiency.

Pardoning racist "Sheriff Joe" will backfire eventually. But if it pisses off liberals, the Trumpers are stoked

It ought to make perfect sense now. For several years, I’ve been comparing Donald Trump’s online behavior to that of an online comment-section troll, or, more specifically, a Twitter troll who’s managed to build a political movement around the concept of deliberately jabbing political opponents simply to watch them freak out. But now, after 221 days of the catastrophic Trump presidency, it should be abundantly obvious that he’s setting policy and making decisions based exclusively on trolling both Democrats and “Never Trump” Republicans.

After all, a significant chunk of Trump’s reputation is wrapped up in his obnoxious Twitter habit — a habit that seems to be partly inspired by the tone and content of “Fox & Friends,” mixed with his desperate need for constant attention. Just about everything he does is geared toward fluffing his rally supporters, including the tormenting of liberals. For example, his desire to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act wasn’t about constructing a better health care system; it was about crapping all over the legacy of his predecessor, Barack Obama, and especially Obama’s supporters. It was about revenge. And his people don’t seem to care that their health coverage would’ve been among the first to be rescinded if one of Trump’s many replacement bills had passed. They didn’t care because Trump’s obsession with repealing Obamacare pissed off liberals.

While there have been many other examples of Trump’s trolling beyond the confines of social media, the most recent example has been the pardoning of racist and convicted criminal Joe Arpaio, the disgraced former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. The close proximity between Trump’s horrendous comments about the Nazi terrorist attack in Charlottesville and the pardoning of Arpaio isn’t mere coincidence. I’d wager that Trump made the decision to pardon the controversial Phoenix sheriff as payback against his political opponents for criticizing Trump’s remarks in which he appeared to sympathize with the white supremacists, KKK members and neo-Nazis who gathered in Charlottesville.

We already know that Trump was furious about the response to his response, to the chaos in Charlottesville. We also know that Trump’s response has damaged his poll numbers and seemed to amplify discussions about his precarious mental health and the possibility of impeachment. Pardoning Arpaio sounds like a great big “screw you” to critics of his three ill-fated attempts at public remarks about Charlottesville, and saving Arpaio from a prison sentence was his way of punishing the opposition by running to the rescue of a notorious birther and anti-immigration racist. And we know that Trumpers love to stir up what they call “liberal tears.”

Grant Stinchfield, host of the National Rifle Association's news outlet NRATV, suggested telling North Korea that Sacramento, CA, has changed its name to Guam amid news reports that North Korea threatened to launch missiles at or near the U.S. island territory.

Guam is currently preparing for a possible “imminent” missile strike. In an August 11 tweet, Stinchfield wrote, “Let’s send a note to North Korea that Sacramento changed its name to Guam!”

As a long-time champion of free speech, I was shocked and appalled on Monday to discover that I’d been let go from my job at Linens ’n Things, simply because some of my so-called co-workers were “offended” by the lengthy manifesto I posted in the breakroom explaining my plan to exile them all to a system of prisons on the dark side of the moon. As a classical liberal, I believe in the free exchange of ideas—specifically, the idea that my coworkers should be forced into the shoddily-constructed rocket ship I’m building in my garage and blasted to the moon immediately—and I find this kind of clumsy censorship to be extremely troubling.

As many other anti-idiotarians have already pointed out, it’s a mistake to dismiss my “Moon Prison Manifesto” simply because I wrote it in crayon. Despite its appearance, it was a carefully documented work drawing from many well-regarded scientific sources. For example, I traced the design for my “Moon Prisoner Transport Rocket (ONE-WAY ONLY)” from a scan of the cover of The Adventures of Tintin: Explorers on the Moon that was published in Wikipedia, which is more or less peer-reviewed. And where was the outrage in the Linens ’n Things boardroom when Guy Pearce made an entire feature film about Moon Prison? Of course I can provide a source for that assertion: I’m a rationalist. Strap in for a Moon Prison trailer, snowflakes:

Lock-Out’s prison is not technically on the moon, but if you think I care about nuance, you clearly haven’t read my “Moon Prison Manifesto.” So unless you were out manning the picket lines against Lock-Out back in 2012, spare me the fake outrage over my Official Moon Prison Top Secret Blueprint Briefcase and the “If Your Name Is On This List, I Hope You’re Looking Forward to Moon Prison” flyers I put under everyone’s windshield wipers. If the work environment is so “hostile” now that my co-workers know I am doing everything I can to exile them all to the moon as quickly as science allows, perhaps the solution lies not in firing me, an innocent bystander in all this, but in allowing the rest of the Linens ’n Things team to live out their natural lives in a way that’s more suited to my estimation of their potential: in an underground Moon Prison buried deep beneath the Korolev Crater. While this, too, may be a “hostile work environment,” in the sense that the moon is hostile to all human life, it will also ensure that Linens ’n Things is much less hostile to me, personally.

Google fired a software engineer yesterday in response to public outrage over the man’s 10-page screed against women being represented proportionally in tech companies. But the firing has become a call-to-arms for alt-right voices on the internet who are crowdfunding money for the engineer, James Damore, and are now calling for a boycott of Google.

The calls for a boycott have gained steam on Twitter, where names like Mike Cernovich, Michael Tracey, and Paul Joseph Watson have joined the chorus of people with usernames like CNNisRetarded, TheMuddyCuck, and Grammar Nawtsy in being angered by what they call “diversity crybullies.”

Some of the calls to boycott the tech giant refer to getting “red pilled,” a term popular in alt-right circles for when people see reality clearly. The term comes from the 1999 sci-fi film The Matrix, where the hero takes a red pill to see the real world around him. In this case, alt-right activists believe that getting red-pilled means you can see the misandry inherent in Google’s decision to fire the engineer.